Recommended Citation Sampath, Anand. "Comprehensive evaluation of four warm asphalt mixture regarding viscosity, tensile strength, moisture sensitivity, dynamic modulus and flow number. ii I dedicate this thesis to my parents, without whom I would not be where I am today iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Plant communities are coupled with abiotic factors, as species diversity and community composition both respond to and influence climate and soil characteristics. Interactions between vegetation and abiotic factors depend on plant functional types (PFT) as different growth forms will have differential responses to and effects on site characteristics. However, despite the importance of different...

Forest fragmentation affects the heterogeneity of accumulated fuels by increasing the diversity of forest types and by increasing forest edges. This heterogeneity has implications in how we manage fuels, fire, and forests. Understanding the relative importance of fragmentation on woody biomass within a single climatic regime, and along climatic gradients, will improve our ability to manage fore...

Frequency of irrigation to the crops is the key factor for proper growth and economic yield. Therefore, in the current study growth of broccoli plants was investigated under different irrigation levels in pot culture condition. Five levels of irrigation schedules were applied including I0 [Non-irrigation control], I1 [Irrigation up to 15 days after transplanting (DAT)], I2 [Irrigation up to 30 ...

In regression with a high-dimensional predictor vector, it is important to estimate the central and central mean subspaces that preserve sufficient information about the response and the mean response. Using the Fourier transform, we have derived the candidate matrices whose column spaces recover the central and central mean subspaces exhaustively. Under the normality assumption of the predicto...

The central mean and central subspaces of generalized multiple index model are the main inference targets of sufficient dimension reduction in regression. In this article, we propose an integral transform (ITM) method for estimating these two subspaces. Applying the ITM method, estimates are derived, separately, for two scenarios: (i) No distributional assumptions are imposed on the predictors,...

We develop tests of the hypothesis of no effect for selected predictors in regression, without assuming a model for the conditional distribution of the response given the predictors. Predictor effects need not be limited to the mean function and smoothing is not required. The general approach is based on sufficient dimension reduction, the idea being to replace the predictor vector with a lower...

Bentonite is a native, colloidal, hydrated aluminum silicate. It occurs as a very fine, odorless, pale buff or cream-colored powder, free from grit, and has a slightly earthy taste. Although it is insoluble in water, it swells to approximately 12 times its volume when added to water. Bentonite magma is prepared by adding 50 gm. of bentonite to a sufficient quantity of purified water to make 1 l...

Existing model-free tests of the conditional coordinate hypothesis in sufficient dimension reduction (Cook (1998) [3]) focused mainly on the first-order estimation methods such as the sliced inverse regression estimation (Li (1991) [14]). Such testing procedures based on quadratic inference functions are difficult to be extended to second-order sufficient dimension reduction methods such as the...

We investigate the estimation efficiency of the central mean subspace in the framework of sufficient dimension reduction. We derive the semiparametric efficient score and study its practical applicability. Despite the difficulty caused by the potential high dimension issue in the variance component, we show that locally efficient estimators can be constructed in practice. We conduct simulation ...